Plum Print booms, turning children's artwork into books

Plum Print, a startup service that turns children's artwork into one-of-a-kind coffee books, recently won a $25,000 grant from Innovation Fund North Carolina. Plum Print is attracting interest now from venture capital investors, well on the way to a first round of $1.5 million in seed money.

Meg Ragland faced the kind of problem that confronts any proud parent. What to do with all those crayoned masterpieces your child brings home from school for display on the refrigerator — semester after semester, grade after grade?

She commiserated with her cousin, Carolyn Lanzetta, also a mother of young children. "What do we do with all this art work? We feel guilty if we throw it out, I know people who have it stuffed in bins in the basement or in the attic," Ragland recalled. "We started talking to other moms and whether their kids were 3 or 33, they all had these bins. So we made our first book."

Ragland used her skills as a magazine editor and journalist and, with Lanzetta, produced a handsome coffee table book celebrating their own budding Renoirs and Picassos. Other moms they knew quickly clamored for their own. "Can you make me one?"

From the inspiration and hard work from a couple of mothers, a new business was born. The start-up known as Plum Print, now headquartered in Asheville, recently won a $25,000 grant from Innovation Fund North Carolina. Plum Print is attracting interest now from venture capital investors, well on the way to a first round of $1.5 million in seed money.

The Plum Print founders weren't novices. Ragland came from a background in magazines. Lanzetta had traded in equities on Wall Street. But they suspected they had a winning business. Within the first year, with only about $2,000 in investment and their sweat equity, they sold about $180,000 worth of books. "Everyone was shocked," Ragland said. "But we were always clear that this was more than just a hobby for two moms."

Ragland moved to Asheville in 2012. Her husband, Gar Ragland, a music producer, wanted to return to his North Carolina roots, and liked a smaller town to raise their children. Gar brought his New Song record label and music series down, working closely with the Echo Mountain Recording Studios.

But Meg Ragland moved her business into the Small Business Incubator at Asheville-Buncombe Technical Community College, finding much needed support and encouragement from mentors and peers. "It's not just about cheap rent. You meet really neat people who are doing everything from chips and salsa to slingshots to websites, but everyone is in the same boat. Every business faces the same kinds of problems in hiring. Everybody feels like they need a 180-hour workweek."

Meanwhile, Lanzetta kept working on her end in Manhattan, where the business was also accepted into the prestigious Tori Burch 10,000 Small Businesses program, a mentoring network for New York start-ups.

Working with long-distance phone calls each night after putting their children to bed, Ragland and Lanzetta nurtured their other baby. "For four months, we built out a growth plan for the next five years, which turned out to be a 400-page document."

Through the incubator, Ragland learned about the Innovation Fund North Carolina, which offers grants to technology entrepreneurs who can grow their companies fairly rapidly, generating more jobs for the state.

Judges were impressed with both founders and the caliber of their business plan, awarding Plum Print a $25,000 grant. "I thought it had a very high growth potential if done correctly. Plum Print showed the capability and the market for their service," said Tony Mifsud, the fund's executive director.

Venture capitalists quickly saw potential for the business to scale up into a national service. "When they started calling, we kept saying we weren't interested. We wanted to bootstrap it ourselves," Ragland recalled.

But Innovation Fund mentors urged them to be prepared to grow, taking that outside seed money. "You better grow big and fast, or someone is going to steal that business," Ragland said.

With its online service, Plum Print allows parents to mail in their children's artwork, which is then digitalized and laid-out for print. The originals are currently mailed back to the parents, but in efforts for greener efficiency, Plum Print will make a charitable donation if parents chose to have the artwork recycled.

Plum Print plans to expand its online services, letting customers archive their own artwork, picking out photos for new calendars, Christmas cards or other scrapbooks.

With those ambitious plans and the seed money coming in, Ragland and Lanzetta have already hired their first employee in April. Sarah Hooker has become the unofficial manager of Plum Print everything, handling more of the day-to-day business, freeing up the founders for the bigger picture.

The company could expand to 30 employees in the next two years, with the majority in Asheville and sales representatives nationwide. Plum Print is graduating from the incubator space and looking for potential office and warehouse space in the Asheville area.

"It's exciting. It's been fun and educational, putting aside my work as a journalist and learning about business," Ragland said.